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Monday, September 16, 2013

Trouble at Castle Funfstein.

The trouble was that the Good King's evil brother staged a coup and threw our heroes in the dungeon since they were known do-gooders.

They promptly escaped, and sans weaponry they fought several battles to get their gear back and then several more. We stopped before they finally got to face off with the Usurper.

Many things were learned in this Lv5 test.

Calculating Damage

Frankly its much too slow to use the rolled value when there is also division to be done. The solution is to give each character a static value to add to their other bonuses and each hit just does that much damage. The static value added is calculated the same as for magic attacks: half the max rolled value of your ATK die.

We had crits doing 1.5x normal damage but I think they will need to go back to 2x. The reason being that the Dragoon could roll 3 crits and not drop a standard, Lv5 soldier. With DMG 15 his crits did 22 and Grunts have 100hp. If he used Jump his DMG went to 19 which still doesn't cut it. Granted this was with a Lv4 Spear but even with a Lv6 Spear (which was randomly in a chest) his numbers are 17/23 (crit 25/34).

So it takes a Lv+1 weapon and 3 crits on 3 attacks (12 on a d12) to one-shot an on-level monster. That's much too low a chance in my opinion. I want to see it be more like a 50% chance using appropriate gear for your level with your normal attacks.

My thought is to improve the rate at which DMG increases both by weapon and base. Right now the top-tier damage dealers have a DMG of [Lv + 6] for their base and Weapon Lv x1 for sword/spear, x2 for Axe or 2hand Sword and x3 for 2hand Axe.

The alternative is to change the monster hp math. Its a lot easier to just do that, but if I narrow the numbers too much then there isn't enough difference by level for them so I will be looking at both methods and coming to some middle ground for the next test.

DMG and M.DMG

Specifically the trade-off between them. Today we discovered that our Lv5 Paladin healed for 12 when using Cura AoE. When you are routinely getting hit for 30 that's not good.

The culprit was that even fully armed and armored plate, shields and swords don't help your M.Dmg. The fix was to just add half their DMG to M.Dmg because that's how Rods and Staffs work in reverse. This helped by upping the AE heals from 12 to 16 and single target from 22 to 26. Hi-Potions heal 50hp. so the AE stuff was good but the single heals were not that valuable, especially not in battle.

Dark Knights would suffer similarly in this regard.

The issue is compounded by having both a low M.Atk die and a slowed progression. I'm confident that they could go to the normal progression while keeping the D8 and become better without worrying the White Mage. For comparison a WM with a Lv5 Rod and Robe would have a Cura of 48 AE and 63 single target. Which, come to see it in print like that, is not that great for single. I think Cura needs a boost there as well from +5hp/die to +10.

I expect the revisions to be done by midweek and I will update the PDFs links then.